


New Cloth

by speakmefair



Category: Shakespeare - Hamlet
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-14 01:16:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laertes is a scholar first....</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Cloth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gileonnen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/gifts).



Laertes, new-made student out of courtier's cloth, enjoys his freedom.

He expresses thoughts and finds them laughed at and dismissed as folly; learns to fight the laughter and prove his point to acclamation; is himself beleaguered; makes one good friend in the first day of arrival and discards him as fast; makes a second and finds him true; falls in love with an ideal and is not rebuffed; lends money against his father's principles; and wins his first argument in a haze of beer and camaraderie that sends him glowing homewards.

He learns the joys of poverty and cold, and wakes in a bed to find his fellow student already ensconced against the wall and stealing all the blankets; wakes him in wrath and discovers the misery of elbows and knees; wakes him in pique and discovers the friendly acceptance of warm breath and a shared cover and sleep-heating arms that still his shivering.

He debates the meaning of honour, and proves his points to the satisfaction of all; and finds, to his disconcerted surprise, that he has gained a following. He never finds out why what he has said should strike such a chord.

Laertes learns, and absorbs, and battles with words and ideals, and is content to do so forever. He misses his sister, misses his ill-advised, well-meaning father; writes letters home and tells them nothing, for how can he say he loves this new freedom of speech and thought and action more than he ever could them?

He learns to take pride when another scholar takes his arm; walks through the streets with them and proclaims a new-found uncourtly and discourteous superiority to the world.

He carries a blade, and loves to show he does so—

For oh, oh the fright of it, the fight of it, the joy of it, the desire of it, the need and clashing and steel purity of it –oh, he would do it again and again and once more for to wear the scar –

Oh God! Oh God! Hamlet!

Because at the last, they understood each other. And in the recognition of that understanding, Laertes too understood -- understood that they will both go to any lengths to bring Ophelia back to them, that he had come to her because she was the only one, now, that he could trust.

 _Doubt truth to be a liar..._

She was the one who always had, who had crossed the lines laid down by Council and by man, unheeding. And now that he needed her to, she had wanted to refuse….and could not. Because of Hamlet, Hamlet who had saved her, when Laertes had failed.

She had agreed.

Why, then, in the days he remembers, the days before he left, does she lies quiet in his arms, those perilous eyes shaded by fluttering, bruised lids, why does it feel when he looks back upon that time as though it was not the first time, but the third time he had betrayed her, and not the only time they had been in agreement, but rather the last?

It is and was as though he were gagged, once again, though this time it would not be vitriol or insults that he wanted to spit at her, he would not drag himself back to his feet for the sake of dented pride, to stand in the rain with a knife in his hand and hatred in his heart. He would not, for he already knows what it means to fight, and ah, here, give me my mark for grace, let me lie in sorrow and still say that it was an honour --

(for to receive that scar)

and he bears and has borne it, and for more years than any of them want to think of, he cleaves to that longed-for mark on his shoulder from practise and is unashamed when it is seen in the communal steam of the baths. It is red, at first; it is raw, and it aches and pulls even while it seems healed; but it soon grows into his skin, as white and raised and thick as those that the Germanian Prussians wear, and as integral. Sometimes, a finger touches it with awe, and he smiles with pride.

Five ways of torture, she said, when she was trying to love him and make him love, she said: five groups of pain, but she was wrong, she was wrong, none of those can compare to the torture of the mind, the one that lasts, the one that will always burn, chill, slide sharp knives into his waking thoughts and pummel his sleeping into fresh alertness, where the city shrieks at him with the loudness of panic, of failure, and completes the group.

Ah loss, even to a dream! It hurts, and pulls worse than the scars. Do men see it in his eyes?

(Later – much later – Reynaldo kisses it with the same pride, and his breast swells with the joy of that moment.)

But at his back, whatever he does, whatever he finds, whatever he comes to discover of himself, whatever love and grappling hooks of steel tether him to this new world and new earth, he hears and knows his own wings of time, his own personal mockery of a ticking clock; the voice that tells him:

 _Hamlet did this first and was more beloved and loving than you for all your new-found enjoyment can ever be._

**

Where are his scars! Laertes accuses, demands, and is never responded to.

His scars, his scars, where are they?

Where! Hamlet keeps his scars, where are they –

More laughter.

"You have better," they say. "Yours are honourable."

Are Hamlet's not, then?

"He loves a girl", they say. "He loves boys, too," they add, and blacken the name of a man Laertes knows to be true in the blackening, but whether Hamlet – no. Best not to think on it.

"I would I had your confidence!" Laertes bursts out with one night, but they only smile at him and say –

"Ah, but you know him."

"Yes!" Laertes cries, and does not say – "I would give so much to know him better."

Laertes endures the nights, and lives them, and defends them, and encourages them, and in the end begets them, and he learns, and he begins to hate.

What kind of man would relinquish this for the ghost of what can never be?


End file.
